Sick Day

It’s Wednesday, and I am siiiiiiiick. I’ve spent the day alternating between flopping on the couch, flopping on my bed, and stalking Meredith Salenger and Patton Oswalt’s wedding photos on Instagram. I intended to bill some time but I just canNOT. Everything hurts too much to think deeply. I did make this honey mustard slow cooker chicken and this jambalaya, wash and fold two loads of laundry, and emptied and refilled the dishwasher, but really those small chores were sprinkled throughout the day and really just an excuse to get up out of the bed a second and see if my head really does hurt this bad. (Yes, it does). Everything is tender, nose is drippy, throat sore, and my joints ache. I caught this from my secretary, who had it at the end of last week and through the weekend. She did go home once it hit bad, but not early enough to spare me. Blerg for illnesses.

Although quite ill, I did manage to do my home physical therapy exercise. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it here, but I’ve had back trouble for years that has slowly gotten worse – it’s gone from a twinge now and again to constant back pain and sciatica down the left leg, wrapping around now to the front of my left hip and basically making life terrible. Long time readers will recall I broke the transverse process of my L-4 vertebra in July 2011 – just a few weeks before my sister’s wedding. I’m told that in the course of healing, my muscles got into a weird symbiosis with each other, where the muscles surrounding the break stopped engaging to protect me from the pain of yanking on the broken place, and the others stepped up and worked a little harder to keep me upright. And they never really stopped doing that, leading to extremely weak muscles and loose ligaments in my low back and rigid, tight muscles and overly tight ligaments up in the mid to low spinal area. The physical therapist, who I saw for the first time yesterday, pushed on parts and pulled on parts and tested my legs (determining that my left leg is significantly weaker than my right, due to the sciatica), and gave me some very tight, tiny exercises to do to focus on loosening the death grip of the strong muscles, and building up the weak ones. So it’s misery, I’m here to tell you. I can barely be upright, everything hurts – independently of the illness making everything hurt. But that’s unavoidable, I guess, so I’ll soldier on. This conservative treatment should take care of it, so I won’t need surgery or anything major. A few months of torturous (and very expensive) PT will hopefully make me right as rain.

Everything else is humming along. The boys are doing well in school, doing well in piano lessons, enjoying Cub Scouts, etc. Craig’s daycare teacher from last year is getting married in a couple of weeks and has asked if I would bring him to see the ceremony, which is so darling. Fingers crossed he’s a good boy – he loves Ms. Megan to pieces, and I could see him dashing down the aisle to get a hug and kiss at an inopportune moment. We’ve been invited to the ceremony only (totally fine with me), so hopefully he can keep it together for the twenty minutes that he has to.

The job is fine also – I enjoy the work, I enjoy the folks I work with, and I’ve gotten used to the number of hours now. We have been able to hire a cleaner who comes biweekly, and we’ve got a small savings account together now, so those are two things that this new job has bought that have had a major impact on my happiness and sense of security. It has its moments, like any job, but as a sixth year I’ve reached the point where I am no longer stressed to the max about it.

Thanksgiving next week. The year flew by, didn’t it? Wishing a lovely holiday season to you and yours.